In May i had the wonderful opportunity to try a live slide build as part of the WIAOC (webheads in action online convergence). They were a great crowd, and the build was awesome. It was the first success that I’ve had with that kind of live interactive slide building, and, well, I’m going to try it again this afternoon. Here’s how it works… I put together a dozen or so slides that are mostly blank with a single question on each slide… we import that slideshow into eluminate (or some other program that will allow for whiteboarding over slides). Each member of the audience is responsible for answering the questions, and I, your confused moderator, will present from the slides as they are being built by the audience.

I don’t know the folks who invited me to speak at this conference (although i think i recognize a name or two). I don’t know if anyone is going to show up… which is a bit nerve wracking for a live presentation created by the audience. So… if your interested in libraries, OER, the future, learning or apple pie, please come along, share your ideas and have some fun.

This is the presentation description as it appears on the your school library website and below are my empty slides.
As more people turn towards opening their work to the world we are confronted with a remarkable challenge. We could change our approach to stewarding content, to encouraging learning and to teaching. We could look at this ever changing landscape of work that others have made and find new and interesting ways of working with these resources. We could decentralize the school and the teacher and connect learners directly with some of the content they are interested in. We could empower teachers to the point where they feel comfortable reusing and remixing these resources to promoted collaboration and life long learning in their students. We might also take these new resources and fit them in with existing objectives, use them to leverage our current curriculum and teaching plans. We could promote the centralization and standardization of these resources into national/provincial/state curricula. These are the decisions that stand before us… how to deal with the change from knowledge being scarce, to it being abundant.

If OERs have the potential of being the dictionary of our era. If it will be the common language, the new knowledge base upon which we work, what effect will this have on the traditional stewards of that
knowledge. Wither the librarians? What literacies will be necessary and what are the potential effects of the decisions that we make about how we deal with the new knowledge. This presentation will be a
facilitated conversation around the continuum between openness and standardization, between collaborative learning and content focused study in the context of this amazing new OER landscape. What’s that going to look like? Here is an example of a previous online presentation of this kind http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1555002 that I did on community learning. Come and join the fun but be ready to participate and the audience will be the most important part of this
presentation.